"Simple, cheap, fast," and somewhere between inaccurate and wrong. From the article:
> To flag grants for their DEI involvement, Fox entered the following command into ChatGPT: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” He then inserted short descriptions of each grant. Fox did nothing to understand ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” as used in the command or to ensure that ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” matched his own.
The culture warrior understanding of the term "DEI" does not reflect reality. The prompt is trash. Garbage in, garbage out.
This is somehow even stupider than similar reports of grants being canceled simply for containing specific keywords commonly used in scientific research but also on the culture warrior no-no list.
Women or minorities being there or being cared about is DEI.
Only men naturally matter. White men I mean. Only right wing white men, actually, bonus point if they are aggressive assholes. That makes them proper masculine.
In what way does ChatGPT’s understanding of the term DEI not reflect reality?
The pejorative sense of DEI has probably poisoned the training data. You might be able to prompt around it, but the existing prompt is pretty lazy.
the dataset is poisoned with a definition you disagree with
Agreement or disagreement are irrelevant if you're asking the LLM for something more precise than generalized racial grievance labeled by the public as DEI.
Newsflash: the definition is amorphous to justify whatever people want.
From the article:
> For example, the AI searches [purportedly related to DEI] flagged .... a film examining how the game of baseball was “instrumental in healing wounds caused by World War I and the 1980s economic standoff between the US and Japan,”
How at all is that DEI? (Surely that should be WWII, yes? The complaint also says "I".)
And, is this also DEI?
> another charting “the rise and reforms of the Native Americans boarding school systems in the U.S. between 1819 and 1934,”
American football would be impoverished without the contributions of Native Americans from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an experimental Native American boarding school.
Pratt, who founded the school, wrote "If all men are created equal, then why were blacks segregated in separate regiments and Indians segregated on separate tribal reservations? Why weren't all men given equal opportunities and allowed to assume their rightful place in society? Race became a meaningless abstraction in his mind." Is that also DEI?
Would you care to summarize what DEI means in reality?
In the sense that viewpoints of people that use the term DEI do not appear to reflect reality?
What kind of sentiment do you think you would find in the training material regarding the term DEI?